Living the Live in the tradition of Advaita Vedanta

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Month: June 2013

The World around often seems so hard, so cruel. While at the same time we feel so gentle, so humble, ready to share our love with everything that visits our Life. I agree that sickness, poverty, unemployment, bankruptcy, divorces and death are not the life-experiences we prefer but, at the same time, we all get our fine share of crisis while being on planet earth. What can we do about it? Or better, do we need to do something about it? It is a question I often get. A quest of Life I remember myself so well. I have been there. All the way. Nearly all of us invite confrontation in life, and then we ask ourselves this question: why is this world not more to my liking, not more how I would have wished it for? Why can it be so harsh at moments?

The good part is: there is an explanation to everything. Let us start where we all start to live our problems. Yes, we all because we all learn to act in this world like being a person in a body, called whatever is our name. When we are at the age of 2 or 3, in the short period when we have learned the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’, we also know our name, speaking it out loudly while pointing at our chest. From here we find our-self as a separated person in the form of a body as part of the world in which we live. Basically this is the identification where most of us will stay till death ends this manifestation. In fact our name, and this yes or no, are the result of identification. An identification that will come up as the setup for our defenses to survive in an outside world that, acts unexpected and not always in our favor.

Worlds Apart (Photo credit: Sony200boy)

We go to school, learn skills, get jobs, a career, a partner, children, a house, health-insurance and a pension-plan: from children-playground to huge castles with sometimes even an empire. The bigger our castle, the better defense we have, the more power we think we need to withstand Life. It sounds harsh but, mainly this is what we do. This is our life: we just want to survive in a world that can and will bring us unexpected disasters.

We might be lucky and build up a castle with the best defenses of the world. Somehow there never even shows up an enemy near the gates. Life begins and ends like a field of flowers. It happens. We all know one or two like that. Unfortunately its just for the happy few of us because, usually our invaders are stronger and more cunning than we are. They exactly know how to take down our defenses. They exactly know how to press the button to open the gate. Just one single event in a split of a second and our defenses will go down. We usually immediately start to repair our walls and canons. Now even stronger with more escape-routes. We take other jobs, other partners and everything that we need to feel ourselves more comfortable with. We even sometimes invite a more spiritual path to understand the meaning of Life. Again unfortunately we just start to check that same invading world that, a moment ago has taken down our walls. While first we now should ask ourselves the question: why did we build that castle in the first place? The realisation that our bodily appearance, as an object in the middle of a world of other objects, is already our biggest defensive castle. It is still one giant step too far at that moment. And here we rebuild again and, again.

No, first we try to become friends with the world. We invite the world in our life. From problems we learn, we call them challenges and so we start to refurbish our houses with furniture from which we secretly hope it will last a life-time. We give them names like feelings, heart, blessing and connection. All pondered with affection. From now on we share our power with the world. Our new defenses we call love and acceptance. We have given up the power trip by not fighting every unwanted phenomena that enters our life. We have found a new way to deal with life-events, to embrace them. Good? Yes but, just for some.

Sometimes we get struck by lightning and there seems no escape. Nowhere to go and nowhere to come. No escape? Is there really nothing at that very moment of loss. No there is not. Better, this having no escape, no tools left to rebuild our castle, is our freedom! Our loss can become the beginning of a new adventure. THE best adventure of our live is ready to embark now.